Medicare homeless fraud: La Mirada doc sentenced

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A former physician from La Mirada who carried out pointless procedures on principally homeless sufferers and billed Medicare and Medi- Cal faces sentencing Monday for collaborating within the $1.fifty five million scheme and submitting a false tax return.

From 2008 to 2012, Ovid Mercene admitted sufferers, most of them homeless, to a Los Angeles-space hospital for remedy they didn’t want with the aim of defrauding taxpayer-funded well being packages, in response to the U.S. Lawyer’s Workplace.

Mercene finally billed Medicare and Medi-Cal greater than $1.eight million for medically pointless providers. He was paid $850,000 and in addition acquired $seven hundred,000 in money for referring these sufferers into expert nursing houses, the defendant admitted.

He pleaded responsible in December 2013 to submitting a false tax return in reference to the scheme. U.S. District Decide R. Gary Klausner is scheduled to condemn the defendant in Los Angeles federal courtroom this morning.

Mercene admitted the sufferers to the hospital the place he labored after watching them being transported by van from skid row to the power, the place they have been typically stored on a particular flooring away from “common” sufferers, in line with courtroom papers.

The homeless sufferers additionally got smoking breaks whereas within the hospital despite the fact that lots of them supposedly suffered from respiratory illnesses. After a brief hospital keep sometimes involving quite a few pointless checks, Mercene discharged them to expert nursing amenities, although they didn’t require such care, he acknowledged.

—Metropolis Information Service

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